Word from the missing prodigy of a hip-hop group on the rise.

The video that made Earl Sweatshirt a star lasts only two and a half minutes, and when it appeared on the video-sharing site Vimeo, on May 26, 2010, most viewers probably didn’t know what to make of Earl Sweatshirt, or why he was in a hair salon, beneath a dryer hood, especially since his head was shaved nearly bald. He was sixteen then, with an oblong face, camel-brown skin, and wide lips. In the video, he seems to be shorter than most of his friends, who join him on a psychedelic adventure that is certainly—though not obviously—staged. A prescription-pill bottle is emptied into a blender, along with cough syrup, malt liquor, and something that looks like marijuana; the result is a nauseous gray-brown slurry that swiftly proves its efficacy. After choking down as much as they can, Earl and his friends grab their skateboards and head out into Los Angeles. They hallucinate, tumble off their boards, fight, convulse, and bleed. Earl spits out two teeth and pulls out a fingernail; by the end, nearly everyone is catatonic, or foaming at the mouth, or both.

This was, by the way, a rap video, and it’s no small tribute to Earl Sweatshirt to say that his rapping was not in the least upstaged by the images that accompanied it. His voice has a pubescent twang, but he sounds disconcertingly calm and clear, especially given his chosen subject matter. The song, which is called “Earl,” turns scenes of horror-movie hedonism into tongue-twisting provocations:

Go on, suck it up—but hurry, I got nuts to bust and

butts to fuck and ups to chuck and sluts to fuckin’ uppercut. It’s

O.F., buttercup. Go ahead: fuck with us.

O.F. stands for Odd Future, the hip-hop crew that comprises most of the young people in the music video. (The full name is Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All Don’t Give a Fuck Loiter Squad—although that’s just one of many full names.) The “Earl” video, which has now been viewed more than three million times, led neophytes into the sprawling but insular world of Odd Future. There were eleven members, and dozens more affiliated skateboarders and scenesters; the group had a homemade Web page where fans could download their homemade albums for free, as well as a photography blog, Golf Wang (it’s a spoonerism), and a constellation of Twitter accounts. Their noxious attitude was seductive, and so, too, was their earnest devotion to the old-fashioned craft of hip-hop: subtle rhythms and unexpected rhyme endings, do-it-yourself beatmaking and engrossing storytelling.

In the year since the release of the “Earl” video, Odd Future has made a steady but extraordinarily steep ascent, which has been marked by a series of surreal milestones: the time Snoop Dogg registered his approval, on Twitter; the cover story in Billboard, with a headline saying that the group “may just be the future of the music business”; the performance on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” which ended with one of the members jumping on Fallon’s back. Odd Future is the first major hip-hop movement that is primarily an online phenomenon, and, in that sense, the group’s sudden rise can seem not only inevitable, in retrospect, but overdue. The members became viral stars long before they were proven ticket-sellers, let alone record-sellers; they built their audience almost entirely through streams and downloads.

As Odd Future has barged into the hip-hop mainstream, it has charmed listeners by sneering at them. A recent article in the Guardian called Odd Future “the world’s most notorious rap group,” which is indisputable, although it should be noted that this title has been vacant for some time—in hip-hop, notoriety hasn’t been in fashion since the early days of Eminem. Odd Future’s willfully repugnant lyrics—the verses contain plenty of violent sexual fantasies, and “faggot” is frequently deployed as a term of address—are designed to nettle cosmopolitan listeners who have come to think of themselves as generally unnettlable, adding an unmistakable element of cruelty to music that can otherwise seem playful. There is something profoundly nostalgic about this strategy: Odd Future sometimes seems intent on resurrecting the bad old days, when hip-hop was scary, even if that means concocting sadistic fantasies or reinforcing old prejudices.

The Odd Future charge has been led by the group’s founder and mastermind, Tyler Okonma, known as Tyler, the Creator. He is a twenty-year-old auteur, rapper, designer, and musician (he created the murky but propulsive beat for “Earl”), who might be described as “lively”—but only by someone prone to understatement. The rise of Odd Future has turned Tyler into a new-media celebrity, a role he was born to play. After a recent performance at the Coachella festival, he wandered into the festival grounds and wasn’t entirely unhappy when well-wishers noticed him and gave chase. On his @fucktyler Twitter account he wrote, “OMG Fucking Just Ran From A Pack Of Fans Threw Coachella. Shit Was Wild!”

The other members of the group have become cult celebrities, too. Hodgy Beats, a diminutive, quick-tempered rapper, is the group’s hip-hop traditionalist and also its self-proclaimed “vice-president”; he is half of the duo MellowHype, along with an eccentric and laconic producer who calls himself Left Brain. Two more rappers, Domo Genesis and Mike G, are known for unhurried verses that both proclaim and evoke their shared dedication to marijuana. Matt Martians makes spaced-out funk. Travis Bennett, known as Taco, and Jasper Dolphin are members but not really musicians; their uselessness has become a running joke. Taco’s sister, Syd (the Kyd) Bennett, is the group’s d.j. and recording engineer. And Christopher (Lonny) Breaux, known as Frank Ocean, is in many ways an anomaly: both the newest member (he was inducted last year) and the oldest (he is twenty-four), he is also the group’s lone singer and the only member with a major record deal—he signed with Def Jam Recordings before he joined Odd Future.

For the past year, though—since shortly after the release of the “Earl” video—Earl Sweatshirt himself has been missing. He hasn’t been making public appearances with the group, and it seems he hasn’t been making private appearances, either. Last summer, a gnomic message appeared on the group’s Tumblr page: “Free Earl.” In July, when the group announced its first proper home-town concert, at the Key Club, in West Hollywood, the official flyer had Earl’s name crossed out and a terse explanation: “Will not be there due to mom.” Earl was still absent in October, when the group played a show in London, at the invitation of the British independent label XL, and, later that month, in New York, where teen-age fans and music-industry executives crowded into a basement and rapped along. But by then Odd Future had turned “Free Earl” into a rallying cry, and it was chanted long and often during the New York show. Because the members declined to say where or what, precisely, Earl needed to be freed from, many fans assumed his mother was the culprit. He was some sort of hip-hop prodigy—the most exciting rapper to emerge in years, a virtuoso who was just starting to figure out what he could do with words—but he was gone. One day last December, Tyler sent out a Twitter message that was at once uninformative and, in its way, deeply affectionate: “DAMN, EARL AIN’T HERE. LETS SWAG IT OUT FOR THAT UGLY ASS NIGGA.”

In 2000, Americans bought about seven hundred and eighty-five million albums, according to Soundscan, and about a hundred million of them—13.4 per cent—were classified as “rap.” By last year, total album sales had dropped by about half, and rap-album sales had dropped even faster, to twenty-seven million—about six per cent of the market. No form of music has suffered more from the industry collapse than hip-hop, a restless, technologically savvy genre wedded to a stubbornly old-fashioned business model. Country music has listeners still eager to buy CDs, and indie rock has bands willing to think of themselves as online startups (and supporters willing to go along); hip-hop is stranded somewhere in between. Fans gorge themselves on free online mixtapes, which are often more vibrant than the albums they ostensibly promote. At the same time, even established acts find themselves hard at work in the old industry, chasing terrestrial radio airplay and night-club spins in pursuit of a diminishing customer base. For the members of Odd Future, hip-hop looks less like a road to financial salvation and more like a playground, full of rusty old attractions and rickety new ones; its dilapidated condition only offers more opportunities for mischief. One night, Tyler was discussing an emerging hip-hop star who had recently spent sixty thousand dollars on a chain. Tyler said, “You know how many fuckin’ tree houses you can make for sixty thousand fuckin’ dollars?”

Odd Future was a social club before it was a hip-hop collective, and the members maintained their recreational approach even as they got more serious about music. They started putting together albums long before they had a clear idea how, exactly, to make this activity profitable. After school and on weekends, they got together to make beats and record their raps, often at a place they call the trap. In Southern hip-hop, a trap is a house that serves as a drug dealer’s home base, but this trap, on a green and quiet street, is a small apartment above a garage on the Bennett family’s property. Taco and Syd the Kyd live with their parents in the elegant house the garage belongs to.

The album that best encapsulates the Odd Future spirit is “Radical,” a compilation that appeared online a year ago. Over a selection of famous and obscure hip-hop beats borrowed—or, if you like, stolen—from established acts, the members introduce themselves. Earl Sweatshirt begins one track by sneaking some autobiography into his wordplay:

This isn’t a plea for sympathy—it’s a declaration of independence, and a motivational statement. Earl insists that rapping well (“fucking these beats”) is the best revenge, and its own reward. Tyler’s approach is similar, but more confrontational. He begins the album with “Splatter,” which was recorded, after numerous false starts, when his voice was hoarse and his mood was foul. In the song, his barbs are absurd (“beating midgets up with ladders”), menacing (“This isn’t rape—this is fuckin’ without a condom on”), and personal (“Deep down, I’m a emo fuckin’ faggot that’s depressed”).

Fans looking to defuse lyrics like these have sometimes pointed out that the group includes one lesbian, Syd the Kyd. But her presence onstage isn’t likely to sway listeners who find the slurs and insults unfunny or pernicious. When a fan wrote to her to complain that the group’s constant use of the word “faggot” was homophobic, she didn’t back down. “Im sorry if the word faggot offends you,” she wrote. “It doesnt offend me. Neither does the word nigger. I got over that long ago.” Syd the Kyd is an emerging heartthrob—she posts some of her fan mail on her blog—and, instead of criticizing hip-hop iconography, she seeks new ways to deploy it. She is half-seriously talking about creating her own brand: the tag line would be “Syd got bitches,” accompanied by a cartoon of her smiling face squeezed between two cartoonishly large breasts.

Although all the members of Odd Future are African-American, their music, especially the raps of Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt, sometimes recalls that of the Beastie Boys and Eminem, white rappers who used exaggerated truculence, early in their careers, to prove that they belonged. They won acceptance from black listeners and adoration from white ones. Odd Future, too, seems to attract a largely white audience, which is by no means unusual or irremediable but which remains a sensitive subject. Tyler once answered a question on this topic with a mixture of pride and resignation. “It Seems Like Skinny White Kids Are My Biggest Fan base,” he wrote. “But Fuck It, At Least I have One, It Was A Time Where No One Gave A Fuck.”

Tyler is more than six feet tall, with a deep, resonant voice, but he moves with the sprightliness of a little kid, pausing for the occasional coughing fit brought on by asthma. He favors bright-colored Vans, slim-fitting shorts, and white tube socks, which he pulls up almost to his knees. He hates being bored, and he has developed two strategies for keeping boredom at bay: either he entertains the people around him, thereby alleviating his misery, or he torments them, thereby sharing it. On a recent afternoon, he and the others were summoned to a local park to be photographed by the Los Angeles Times, and, once the shoot was over, Tyler found himself perilously underoccupied. He grabbed his skateboard and did a few laps around the parking lot, sending skyward a stream of idle and sometimes incoherent thoughts: “If I’m a fuckin’ bitch—guess what! Maybe I am!” He sat down on the sidewalk next to Jasper Dolphin. An older white man shuffled past with his family, dragging a bag on wheels. “Fuckin’ loser has a roller backpack,” Tyler said, plenty loud enough to be overheard. The man stopped, turned, and stared. “He would have got fucked up if this was seventh grade,” Tyler said, not making eye contact, and the man stared some more.

A friend arrived with a car and a video camera; the group was gathering material for a proposed show on Adult Swim, on the Cartoon Network. One idea was to have Tyler drive while Jasper, on his skateboard, held on to the passenger-side window and got pulled along. Tyler started slowly, but then turned onto a side street and accelerated, and so did Jasper—who then swiftly decelerated in a pile of trash bags. Tyler pulled over and got out of the car. He spied a man in basketball shorts and a sweatshirt. “Hey,” Tyler shouted. “You dropped your wallet!”

The man looked down, realized this was a prank, and looked up at Tyler, registering the face and the famous tube socks. “Aren’t you Tyler, the Creator?” he said. For a brief, rare moment, Tyler was speechless.

Tyler was born in 1991, the son of a social-worker mother and an African father, who is a conspicuous presence—that is, absence—in his son’s rhymes. Tyler’s first album is called “Bastard.” The title track is an orgy of self- and non-self-loathing, building to a bitter punch line: “My father didn’t give a fuck, / so it’s something I inherit. / My mom is all I have, so it’s never ‘Meet the Parents.’ ” In person, he offers only a little more biographical information. “My father’s from Nigeria,” he says. “That’s what my mom told me—but she also told me she loved me, the other day.” His mother is a cheerful, voluble woman who must be at least partly responsible for Tyler’s verbal exuberance, and though she declines to comment about Tyler’s relationship with his father, she says she is nothing but impressed by her son. “I don’t have any problems with what he raps about or what he says,” she says. “If people want to take that shit seriously, about whatever, then that’s on them.” She also says that the passion Tyler inspires is proof that he’s onto something: “People can relate to his music because either they’re going through something or they remember the hell that they were going through—tough times, as a teen.”

As a boy, Tyler was distractible but precocious. He got a copy of Reason, a music-production program, when he was twelve, and started teaching himself the piano when he was thirteen. Having established himself as a disruptive presence throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District, he eventually wound up at Media Arts Academy, in Hawthorne, which was also known as Hip-Hop High: it was a last-chance charter school that used music facilities to lure students from all over the city who might otherwise have dropped out, or already had. One of his instructors was Jacques Slade, a hip-hop fan (and a former rapper) who quickly realized that Tyler was the most dedicated and creative young musician in the school. One of Tyler’s early efforts was a silly but carefully constructed track called “Herpes on My Lip,” in which he pitch-shifted his voice, to make himself sound like an R-rated baby, and added woozy keyboard chords. “Any criticism toward his work back then, it was strictly toward the content of his lyrics,” Slade says.

Tyler was also making a name for himself on a Web site called Hypebeast, which is devoted to the intersection of hip-hop and fashion; he used the message boards to post long screeds about his life and to solicit interest in his early musical projects. When one listener accused him of ripping off the Neptunes, Tyler wrote, “If its not ‘original’ enuff, fuck it, ill take my chance.” (Like many provocateurs, he is intensely sensitive to criticism.) And in September, 2008, when an affiliated music blog called Hypetrak called him “one of those artists that deserves to be heard on a larger scale,” Tyler didn’t hide his exultation. “O shit,” he wrote. “I made it.”

Odd Future was coming together, too, around then: a loose confederation of like-minded young people from various high schools who hung out together on a stretch of Fairfax Street that was home to skateboard and street-fashion shops. Tyler had been working on an Odd Future magazine (never published) and an Odd Future T-shirt line since before the group existed, and he was unquestionably the leader; prospective members had to win him over. Hodgy found his way to Odd Future through Left Brain, who had known Tyler since middle school. “He says no to everybody,” Hodgy says. “But he said yeah to me.” Frank Ocean received his formal invitation during a casual conversation with Hodgy. And Mike G found out he was an official member only when he overheard Hodgy describing him that way to someone else.

Part of Odd Future’s appeal is its autonomy: members share a visual aesthetic (Tyler designs the album covers) and a vocabulary (“swag” figures heavily: a noun, an adjective, a verb, and an all-purpose expression of agreement or endorsement), and they have no special connection to the Los Angeles hip-hop scene. Many of them first interacted through MySpace, and, by the time any of hip-hop’s gatekeepers took note of them, they already had an online identity and had released nearly a dozen albums themselves.

Last summer, Odd Future acquired a pair of well-connected managers, Christian Clancy and Dave Airaudi, both veterans of Interscope Records, the home of Eminem, Dr. Dre, and 50 Cent; some observers viewed this as proof that Odd Future was about to join the mainstream record industry, or already had. Jay-Z met with the group, in hope of signing Odd Future to his Roc Nation label, and Sean (Diddy) Combs energetically pursued a friendship. Steve Rifkind, a veteran hip-hop executive, delivered his pitch in public, on Twitter:

Hey @fucktyler and @oddfuture have not been this excited since 1993 when I heard a group called @wutangclan.

Tyler fired back a dyspeptic response, also on Twitter:

@steverifkind You Sound Like The One Dude Who Goes To Schools And Tell Little Boys That You Have Puppies And Shit. No “Offense.”

Tyler eventually met with Rifkind, but, instead of signing a big record contract, the members signed a series of small ones. Tyler agreed to a one-album deal with XL, and MellowHype arranged with Fat Possum, a small label based in Mississippi, to issue a retail version of “BlackenedWhite,” the duo’s 2010 online album. Frank Ocean, who already had a record contract, released his début album, “Nostalgia, ULTRA,” in February, as a free download; the album, which is by far the subtlest and prettiest item in the Odd Future catalogue, instantly transformed him into one of R. & B.’s most acclaimed singer-songwriters. (Soon after its release, Ocean tweeted a photograph of himself in the studio with Beyoncé.) Last month, the group itself signed a distribution deal with a subsidiary of Sony, which is supposed to preserve the members’ autonomy while providing them with something most of them have never seen before: royalty checks. Earl Sweatshirt remains a free agent—and a question mark.

Earl Sweatshirt, shown on a sticker made by fans of Odd Future.

The biggest step so far in the monetization of Odd Future is “Goblin,” Tyler’s first retail album, which was released on May 10th, and is all but guaranteed to find a place near the top of the American and British charts. A music video from it, “Yonkers,” shows Tyler in silhouette, eating a cockroach, regurgitating it, and delivering an opening line that sums up his philosophy: “I’m a fuckin’ walking paradox / No, I’m not.” When he finally saw the video on MTV, Tyler unleashed a stream of exultant Tweets; he did the same the first time he heard the song on the biggest Los Angeles hip-hop radio station, Power 106. (It turns out that the members of Odd Future aren’t entirely uninterested in old-industry prestige.) But all the positive feedback also means that, for the first time, Tyler has to contend with other people’s high expectations, as well as his own. “In three years, I could be a failure,” he said one night, unprompted. “I’ll only be twenty-three—some niggas are twenty-three, they have their whole lives ahead of them. I could fuck up. This next single could be a failure.” He put his head in his hands. “Dude. I’m nervous.”

That sense of anxiety pervades “Goblin,” starting with the title song, in which he argues with a disembodied voice that says, tauntingly, “Everyone loves you, Tyler, you have to admit that.” His spoken response is a parody of celebrity self-pity: “I don’t even skate anymore, I’m too fuckin’ busy.” The album is sometimes punitive in its single-mindedness: an hour of evil, hazy synthesizer lines and bilious psychodrama. But “Goblin” should be an extraordinarily effective fan-recruitment tool, and it arrives as a new, international wave of Odd Future hysteria is cresting. A recent London concert ended when fans stormed the stage, and New Musical Express, the impulsive British rock tabloid, put Tyler on the cover, wearing a crown, to mock the royal wedding. Young listeners around the world will doubtless spend the summer relaying the album’s slogan: “Kill people! Burn shit! Fuck school!”

If Tyler is the cult leader, Earl Sweatshirt remains, even in absentia, the Odd Future member with the most flabbergasting lyrics. He emerged in 2009 on a song called “AssMilk,” trading quatrains with Tyler. The contrast was instructive. Tyler is a clever but effortful rapper, working hard to squeeze jokes and ideas into his lyrics, and harder still to push his lyrics out with his inflamed bronchia. In one typically sturdy and obnoxious couplet, inspired by his disdain for the Los Angeles phenomenon known as jerking (a briefly ascendant local dance craze), he seems to be repeating himself, though he is actually changing the meaning by tweaking the words:

I hate gays, gang-bangers, and fuckin’ jerkers—

unless it’s gay gang-bangers that’s fucking jerkers.

These are stubborn, declarative lines; like many of Tyler’s best lyrics, this one is a lumpy sentence beaten, more or less, into verse. Earl is more graceful, more fluid, and although he shares Tyler’s belief that sex and violence are funny, especially in combination, he often gets distracted by the musical potential of words. At his best, he pushes his lyrics to the brink of gibberish, delighting in the echoing syllables:

Your grind’s feeble, I’m regal—really, I’m Willy Smith,

“I Am Legend,” a Snicker dick in a vanilly chick.

There was something mysterious, and therefore enticing, about this younger, quieter, nimbler rapper who seemed less eager to be known. His astonishing 2010 début album, “Earl,” begins with an eighty-second introduction, which devolves into a roast:

TACO: “This nigga forehead is so fuckin’ big.”

TYLER: “That’s fucked up.”

TACO: “This nigga looks like an African poet.”

TYLER: “Earl, Earl, say something.”

Earl doesn’t say anything but just starts rapping and keeps going for about twenty-five minutes. It’s a short album, closer in length and tantalizing feel to a demo tape. One song, “Luper,” starts with our hero eating breakfast—“a plate of eggs and bacon, glass of O.J. Simpson”—and pining for a young woman who isn’t pining back:

Seems kinda brash, but it’s the hash—I mean, the harsh truth:

she runs shit; she’s the jock, I’m the horseshoe.

By the third verse, the protagonist has revealed himself to be a kidnapper and a rapist. The track ends, as it began, at breakfast, and where orange juice prefigured violence, now milk confirms it: “her name on my arm and her face on a two-percent carton.” But, despite the carnage, the album exudes adolescent normalcy; one track consists entirely of a voice that is supposedly Earl’s mother—she sounds suspiciously like Syd—trying to wake him up for school. (“I’m asleep with my eyes open—that’s fuckin’ logical,” he says, groggy but sarcastic.) By the time most listeners heard “Earl,” the young man who made it had disappeared, and Odd Future had acquired a catchphrase and a cause.

“Free Earl” was derived from earlier, similar pleas made on behalf of rappers in prison: “Free Lil Wayne!” “Free Pimp C!” “Free Tupac!” By last fall, with interest in the group building, “Free Earl” started to seem less like an inside joke and more like a public crusade. Fans started Web sites and began using “Free Earl” as an all-purpose expression of fandom—a password for entry into Odd Future’s cult. Tyler fed this movement with “Free Earl” graphics and a T-shirt emblazoned with a grainy photograph of Earl Sweatshirt and the words “MISSING: HAVE YOU SEEN ME?” At times, though, Tyler was bothered by the spectacle of thousands of strangers adopting one of his best friends as their pet cause. In one song, he describes his mixed feelings: “Niggas saying ‘Free Earl’ without even knowing him / See, they’re missing the new album, I’m missing my only friend.” And even while mourning his friend’s absence, Tyler refused to reveal anything about where Earl was, or for how long. Earlier this year, Peter Rosenberg, a hip-hop radio personality, asked Tyler, “Is he aware of how crazy shit is right now?”

“No,” Tyler said. “He’s dead.”

Rosenberg said, “He’s dead to the world?”

“No,” Tyler said. “He’s dead. Change the subject.”

One night, sitting at the dining-room table of Christian Clancy, one of his managers, Tyler said, “We had so much in common. We’d skate, listen to the same music, the same sense of humor. I mean, everyone’s my nigga, but with me and him it was like the same person.” Then he caught himself. “The shit sucks,” he said. “I don’t like talking about it.”

The absence of Earl is starting to affect Odd Future’s music, too. When Fat Possum issues its new version of MellowHype’s latest album, one song, “Chordaroy,” will be missing—it features an Earl Sweatshirt verse, and Fat Possum does not have the right to use it. At the dining-room table, Tyler was trying to figure out a design for an Earl Sweatshirt sweatshirt. He pulled up the T-shirt design on his laptop. “We can’t sell this no more—his mom could sue us,” he said. “It sucks when shit gets legal.”

Ocean, who joined the group around the same time Earl went missing, examined the image. “When does he turn eighteen?”

Tyler frowned. “Next fuckin’ February,” he said. Then he opened up Paintbrush, Apple’s rudimentary drawing program, created a big tan oval, and started filling it in, adding a pair of bright-pink lips and leaving a high, blank forehead—fans would know who it was. He said, “Doesn’t this look like Thebe?”

It was no secret that Tyler and the others sometimes referred to Earl Sweatshirt as Thebe—pronounced “TEH-beh”—and it wasn’t hard to find old skateboard videos where other people also called him by that name.

Here is what fans knew: Before Thebe was Earl Sweatshirt, he called himself Sly, short for Sly Tendencies. He attended New Roads, a private school in Santa Monica, where one of his friends, and his first producer, was Solomon Allison, who produces hip-hop under the name Loofy. He and Earl met during a ninth-grade field trip, when Loofy and some friends were beat-boxing and freestyling, and Earl started rapping. A few weeks later, he called Loofy at home, and Loofy held up his Sidekick Slide to the phone, broadcasting beats over the line so that Earl could rap along. “He was freestyling for hours,” Loofy says. “He would not let me get off the phone.” They posted tracks online, which caught the attention of a fledgling independent label, which planned to put out a CD called “Kitchen Cutlery.” The album was never completed, but a handful of early songs remain in circulation, and they capture a precocious young rapper with an already great flow, trying to figure out what to do with it. Often, he falls back on quaint expressions of his lyrical superiority:

Y’all forever last, I’m forever everlasting,

mashing on the gas, bypassing all the has-beens.

Listeners could also find traces of Sly on his old blog, slytendencies.blogspot.com, which has been deleted from blogspot but not, of course, from the Internet. In the first entry, from March 6, 2009, the future Earl Sweatshirt reviewed his own career so far:

I’ve been writing for a bit, and I’ve been spitting since like the sixth grade. I sucked ass until about seven months ago, when I hit an epiphany. I’m not quite sure exactly what it was, but it was for the better. I rap.

Tracks by Sly attracted some attention on MySpace, and soon—sometime in the summer of 2009—he was asked to join Odd Future, which was already building a reputation in Los Angeles and online. “That was, like, the élite,” Loofy said. “When you O.F., you just O.F.” Sly became Earl Sweatshirt and started spending time with his new partners, especially Tyler, who clearly helped the younger rapper embrace a spirit of delirium that made his music much more powerful and more unsettling.

In early April, an obsessive fan from Texas, posting on a Kanye West message board, unearthed a vital piece of information: Thebe used to study a Korean martial art called Hwa Rang Do. That made things easy: a Google search of “Thebe” and “Hwa Rang Do” led directly to the World Hwa Rang Do Global Association Web site, which led, rather less directly, to a YouTube video of a teen-ager who looks like Earl Sweatshirt, executing a series of takedowns. Another option was to explore the digital trail generated by the short-lived career of Sly, which leads, eventually, to a long-abandoned Twitter page that has somehow escaped the notice of the Odd Future horde. The name at the top matches the name on the Hwa Rang Do Web site: Thebe Kgositsile.

The hip-hop magazine and Web site Complex had been tracking Earl Sweatshirt, too, and on April 14th Ernest Baker and Jacob Moore published their findings beneath an exultant headline: “Complex Exclusive: We Found Earl Sweatshirt.” They had noticed that, on a recently released track, Hodgy promises “to free Earl from the fuckin’ Samoans.” On a hunch, they combed Facebook for references to Earl Sweatshirt and Samoa, which led them to pictures of a familiar face on the Web site of a reform school, and the case was closed: Earl had been traced to a school for troubled boys in Samoa.

When the article was published, Tyler’s reaction was characteristically impassioned: on Twitter, he called the story “false info” and called the reporters “fucking pedophiles.” A few minutes later, he tried a more contemplative approach:

I Signed Up For This Shit Tho. Just Gotta Get Used To Being “Famous.” Everything Is Under A Fucking Microscope Now. Ima Swag It Out.

Until last month, the most famous Kgositsile in the world was Keorapetse Kgositsile, who is one of South Africa’s most celebrated poets. In 2006, he was named the poet laureate, and he is a frequent presence at South African literary conferences and festivals. One of his best-known poems is “Towards a Walk in the Sun,” in which a poet imagines his own demise—or, at any rate, his obsolescence. There is a gruesome, hallucinatory catalogue of racially charged horrors and insults, most of them phrased as accusations:

You who bleached the womb of your daughter’s

mind to bear pale-brained freaks. You who bleached

your son’s genitals to slobber in the slime of missionary-

eyed faggotry.

In the final stanza, the recrimination builds to a furious italicized expression of poetic abnegation:

when the moment hatches in time’s womb

there will be no art talk. the only poem

you will hear will be the spearpoint pivoted

in the punctured marrow of the villain.

Something about this image—the poet, awaiting the end of poetry and the start of revolution—captured the imagination of a group of like-minded oral poets in Harlem, who called themselves the Last Poets, in tribute to Kgositsile. Starting in 1970, the Last Poets released a string of fiery spoken-word albums that prefigured the rise of hip-hop. Of course, some people might say that hip-hop betrayed the promise of Kgositsile and the Last Poets, instead of fulfilling it. (During the genre’s thirty-odd years, there has been a minimum of “art talk” and a maximum of “punctured marrow.”) When South Africa’s day of redemption finally came, in 1994, “the moment” was later than Kgositsile imagined, and maybe gentler, too.

During the apartheid years, Kgositsile lived in exile and travelled widely. While visiting Chicago in the nineteen-eighties, he spent time with a poet named Sterling Plumpp, who introduced him to an African-American woman who was active in political circles. She and Kgositsile had in common their twinned commitments to black struggle in America and South Africa, and they shared a passion for Chicago’s politically charged and aesthetically radical jazz scene. When they were married, Plumpp couldn’t help but see their relationship as an allegory. “I felt the diaspora had been reunited in their union,” he says, chuckling at his own high-mindedness.

By the early nineteen-nineties, Kgositsile was dividing his time between Johannesburg, where his old African National Congress comrades were finally taking power, and Los Angeles, where he shared a house with his wife and had an adjunct teaching appointment in the English Department at U.C.L.A. In 1994, the couple’s only child was born: Thebe Neruda Kgositsile. (“Thebe” is Setswana for “shield”; the middle name is an homage to the Chilean poet.) In photographs, the resemblance is obvious: the son has inherited his father’s broad lips and wide-set eyes. When Taco said that Earl looked like “an African poet,” he was talking about one poet in particular.

Earl’s parents’ marriage fell apart about a decade ago, and Kgositsile now lives in South Africa full time. He has heard about his son’s growing reputation among hip-hop fans, but he says he has never heard Earl Sweatshirt or Odd Future, and he hasn’t sought out any of the recordings. “When he feels that he’s got something to share with me, he’ll do that,” Kgositsile says. “And until then I will not impose myself on him just because the world talks of him.” Although he proudly describes his son’s precocious intelligence—“He read even before he started school,” he says—Kgositsile resists the suggestion that, through hip-hop, his son is carrying on the family business, and he suggests that Thebe’s emergence as a second-generation lyricist might be “coincidence.” He is not a fan of “commercially promoted” hip-hop—“I really don’t think it’s about anything of relevance, socially, other than young people saying they’re hurt”—and his verdict on his son’s career is carefully noncommittal. “Frantz Fanon said that each generation must find its own mission,” Kgositsile says. “If he’s part of those that have found their mission, then I’m very happy.”

In 2002, Kgositsile published “If I Could Sing,” a slim collection that ends with a poem called “Rejoice.” Its title is also its first line:

REJOICE

Says Thebe Neruda of the vibrant smile

The eye so curious it is reluctant

To shut the world out even in sleep

He beholds a boy endowed with the fierce decency of Betty Carter, the jazz singer, who had died a few years earlier. But near the end, unexpectedly, comes a ringing admonition—the celebrant has said too much:

Poet leave him

Leave him alone

You have praised him

You have praised him

Without knowing his name

Kgositsile’s bruised idealism has no obvious analogue in his son’s rhymes, which shrug off the righteousness that weighs so heavily on the father. Hip-hop has proved to be a less volatile form than liberation poetry, and its general disinclination to be useful—to do something—helps account for both its longevity and its lousy reputation among many of the people who might otherwise be expected to love it. Odd Future’s heedlessness is a crucial part of the group’s appeal, and it inspires a similar heedlessness in fans, hungry for more music, who don’t know or really care why a sixteen-year-old boy wound up in Samoa or what effect sudden fame would have on him.

But Thebe Kgositsile had a shadow life as a literary character, a projection of other people’s enthusiasms and imaginings, long before Odd Future came into existence. In 1995, in the pages of a Chicago literary magazine called TriQuarterly, Sterling Plumpp published “Poet: for Thebe Neruda,” a tribute to his friends’ new son. The poem appeared in the 1996 edition of “The Best American Poetry,” and it revolves around a transfigured snippet from an old Wilson Pickett song:

You

come in the myth

night hour.

This is a baby imbued with the spirit of South Africa’s martyred heroes, and as the names redound, the glorious legacy starts to seem like an impossible burden. Near the end, Plumpp deftly switches registers, cutting short his airy reverie (“As the poet in your veins / ascends a mountain. To / trap the condor of your being. / As you soar”) to ask an earthy question:

You

were born with blues.

With an ANC imprint

on them. How you gon

do anything but rule?

On a Friday night, at the end of another long and intermittently productive week in Los Angeles, the other members of Odd Future crammed into a rental van to drive to Pomona, where they had booked a concert. The venue, called the Glass House, has a capacity of eight hundred, and the tickets had all disappeared within an hour of the announcement. By the time the group got there, around six, there was a line of fans waiting for the door to open; they were mainly white and Latino, and almost all of them seemed to be younger than twenty-one.

Tyler hustled straight from the van to the dressing room so he wouldn’t get swarmed, and Taco grabbed his skateboard and headed toward the line of fans, in the hope that he might. After the sound check, a few fans were ushered backstage by Christian Clancy, who is well aware that Odd Future’s ability to inspire crazed loyalty is its greatest asset. The fans had a stack of professional-looking stickers that they had printed, based on Tyler’s T-shirt design: the face of the boy formerly known as Thebe Kgositsile and the words “MISSING: HAVE YOU SEEN ME?” Everyone crowded around. “These are tight as fuck,” Hodgy said. Tyler didn’t say anything: he was in the corner, unseen by the fans, curled up under a pile of sofa cushions, with only his bright-blue Vans exposed—hidden but also conspicuous.

A security guard arrived and called a huddle so that he could issue some stern instructions. “If you guys are going to stage dive, jump from the barrier,” he said. “Don’t jump from the stage over the barrier.”

It was nearly nine, and Tyler had something important that he had to do soon, but nothing at all that he had to do immediately—a dangerous combination. “Oh, my gosh, dude,” he said. “I’m so bored right now.” He instigated a friendly shoving match with Hodgy Beats, which evolved into shadowboxing, then sumo wrestling, and then an anarchic game of duck-duck-goose. When the energy flagged, Tyler cried out, “Back-yard wrestling!” and brought an empty pizza box down on the head of Domo Genesis.

When Tyler finally bounded onstage, he sounded raspier than usual, but it scarcely mattered. He was wearing a blue Thrasher sweatshirt and a green ski mask, and tore into “Sandwitches,” an old favorite. When he got to the end of the first verse he pulled off the ski mask to reveal his face. Then he jumped into the crowd—from the stage, of course, not the barrier.

The concert was a high-spirited mess, which is to say a success, by any reasonable measure, especially since noise and chaos are essential to the group’s appeal. Odd Future’s managers aren’t always able to restrain themselves from invoking Nirvana when discussing their clients, presenting Tyler and crew as a merry band of hip-hop reformationists, ready to shove aside a bloated rap aristocracy. But then every important rapper of recent years, from 50 Cent and Kanye West to Lil Wayne and Gucci Mane, has been presented as an insurgent, ready to overthrow some version of the hip-hop establishment. If the members of Odd Future maintain this trajectory, they could join the list, earning an indelible—and, for what it’s worth, specious—reputation as the latest saviors of hip-hop. Near the end of the show, Syd the Kyd cued up “Earl,” the song, and the audience rapped along with Earl’s recorded voice: “Twisted sicker than mad cattle, in fact I’m off / six different liquors, with a Prince wig plastered on.” The group started shuffling off, but a young female fan took the stage, and the crowd called for her to get naked, until she protested that she had a boyfriend, at which point the crowd chanted, “Slut! Slut! Slut!”

Another young woman—or maybe the same one—found her way backstage, and stumbled around until someone discovered that she was sixteen, at which point the managers rousted her. This being California, there was no shortage of glaucoma medicine, to the delight of nearly everyone except Tyler, who is straight-edge, and Tyler’s mother, who had driven out for the concert and wanted to congratulate him before she left. She peered into a low backstage balcony. “You smoking your asses out up there?” she said. “You doing something you don’t got no business doing?”

After a few more minutes, the van arrived, filled up, and pulled out onto the street, with Tyler and a few of the others riding in Christian Clancy’s Porsche S.U.V., a few feet behind. The van headed out through the streets of Pomona, hailed by a few dozen fans who lined the sidewalk, shouting, “Swag! Swag! Free Earl!”

Over the past year, Earl’s mother, who is now an educator, has often been cast as the villain in the Earl Sweatshirt saga. The popular narrative, she says, is that “he’s been snatched out of the limelight by someone, by his mother, with ill intentions to squash his creativity.” And, because she fears for her security, she agreed to talk only on the condition that she not be named. She describes young Thebe as a friendly and intellectually nimble boy, a great talker who might have been (and might still become) a standup comedian. Last summer, she realized that his online musical experiments were starting to generate real-world results, and she arranged for him to go to Samoa at least partly because she was worried about the uncertain effects of sudden stardom. “I just felt like, given the record that we have of sort of crash-and-burn situations of young people who get eaten up too soon, that he just deserved a chance,” she says.

The “Free Earl” campaign makes Earl into a prisoner, and it frames his absence as an injustice; he is the victim, but so are the fans, who have been denied his art. But for Earl’s mother the true injustice is the idea that a sixteen-year-old boy should be “free”—that is, forced—to leave boyhood behind. “There is a person named Thebe who preëxisted Earl,” his mother continued. “That person ought to be allowed to explore and grow, and it’s very hard to do that when there’s a whole set of expectations, narratives, and stories that are attached to him.” She says she wanted to give him some time away from the spotlight—and, by implication, from the Internet. “The default presumption is just that, yeah, he should be out there onstage right now,” she says. “Is it crazy to think that a kid ought to be allowed to finish high school?”

Earl’s mother agreed to transmit some questions to him, by e-mail, and to relay his answers. The circumstances of this exchange surely influenced the tone or content of his replies, but the seventeen-year-old boy who is—or was—Earl Sweatshirt comes across as a thoughtful young man trying to figure out what, exactly, has happened to him. When asked whether he was involuntarily confined, his answer was vehement. “No, no no no no no no no no no no,” he wrote. “Please listen: I’m not being held against my will.”

“The couple of months leading up to my departure were a mess for me,” he wrote, declining to elaborate, and he described his long separation from Los Angeles, and from his friends, in the language of therapy, not punishment:

I’ve had to do a lot of growing up since I left, so naturally my perspective has changed. A lot less effort is exerted toward proving that I care less than you about everything, so I’m a lot less frantic. I guess the simplest way to put it is that I’m more comfortable with myself, which is something that I couldn’t have told you like eleven months ago.

He said he knew that his friends had become celebrities in his absence:

I’ve been watching all of this unfold the entire time. The “Free Earl” campaign and the ridiculously large amount of publicity OF’s getting. It’s been pretty strange for me. A lot of times I have trouble wrapping my head around things like OF being on the Coachella ticket or there being a more-than-substantial international fan base because you can’t really experience things like that to the fullest extent vicariously, no matter how hard you try.

He hasn’t been composing many rhymes over the past year. “I still write stuff from time to time when I get excited or feel moved to, but none of it’s really too groundbreaking or anything,” he explained. “I’ve got other things on my mind.” It turned out, too, that the ostensible object of the “Free Earl” movement found himself increasingly disturbed by it:

Initially I was really pleased that all these people claimed that they wanted me released because I thought that translated into “they care.” So time progresses and the fan base gets bigger and the “Free Earl” chants get louder but now with the “Free Earl” chants come a barely indirect “Fuck Earl’s Mom” and in the blink of an eye my worry changes from “will there still be this hype when I get back” to “Oh shit I just inspired a widespread movement of people who are dedicated to the downfall of my mom.” I can say there have been few things in my life worse than the moment I was trying to figure out who started all this “let’s get together and hate Earl’s mom” business and had now subjected her to potential physical harm and realized that in a way it was me.

Asked if he wants to send a message to his fans, he tried to be unequivocal:

The only thing I need as of right now is space. I’ve still got work to do and don’t need the additional stress of fearing for my family’s physical wellbeing. Space means no more “Free Earl.” If you sincerely care than I appreciate the gesture, but since you know the hard facts from the source, you no longer need to worry. This applies for anyone affiliated with OF, fans and members alike.

When will he come back? He can’t—or won’t—say. “Hopefully soon,” he wrote. “I miss home. I don’t have any definite date though. Even if I did I don’t know if I’d tell you. You’ll hear from me without a doubt when I’m ready.” ♦